Pouring beverages during airline flights present unique challenges. Space is limited in passenger cabins and the aisle or aisles through the length of the passenger cabins are generally quite narrow, requiring space on food and beverage carts for serving passengers to be limited. As such, beverage servers used on such food and beverage carts will ideally occupy as little space as possible. In addition, aircraft and other passenger transporting vehicles often encounter areas of uneven ground surface, varying air pressure or air turbulence or other disturbances that act on the plane or other vehicle to produce abrupt elevation changes or other movements. These changes in surface level, pressure differences, or turbulence, can result in a bumpy ride for the passengers and make it difficult to pour beverages such as coffee or tea that are provided in beverage servers and also provide challenges with respect to the stability of the beverage servers when resting on the surfaces of serving carts. In heavy turbulence, food and beverage serving carts or beverage servers that are resting on a surface of such cart could actually tip over, making the retention functions of the beverage servers particularly important.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a stable beverage server having a low center of gravity and therefore relatively resistant to tipping over. It is another object of the invention to provide a beverage server having a cap that is easily placed onto and removed from the server body yet remains securely in place on the server body. It is a further object of the invention to provide a cap for a beverage server that can selectively open or close a pour spout in the beverage server so as to prevent accidental spills. It is a still further object of the invention to provide a beverage server having a vent which provides for inflow of air into the server as a beverage is being dispensed through the pour spout.
These and other objectives and advantages of the invention will appear more fully from the following description, made in conjunction with the accompanying drawings wherein like reference characters refer to the same or similar parts throughout the several views.